I went into my GlycanAge biological age test expecting good news. I eat well, I fast, I train hard, I sleep, and I have built my whole life around the things I teach. I am 56, and I assumed my biological age would land somewhere in my forties. It came back at 52.
My inflammation markers looked good and my immune system looked strong. The one thing that showed up was what Nikolina calls the manager profile, which describes a person carrying too much, resting too little, and running on a nervous system that never fully powers down. The test found the exact part of my life I had been stepping around for years.
I sat down with Nikolina Lauc, CEO and co-founder of GlycanAge, to talk about what her test measures and what she has learned from hundreds of thousands of samples. Two people born on the same day can be aging at completely different rates, and the answer she gave to almost every question I asked came back to the same place. It depends entirely on the person in front of you.
What Glycans Measure That Other Markers Miss
Glycans are complex sugar molecules, and they have nothing to do with the sugar in your coffee. They are the language your cells use to speak to one another, and we exist as multicellular beings because that conversation happens at all. Nikolina’s father, Professor Gordan Lauc, spent decades building the science this test rests on.
What matters most for aging sits on your antibodies. Glycans attached to your IgG antibodies determine whether those antibodies behave in a pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory way, and antibodies are among the most abundant proteins in your blood. These small sugar structures end up regulating inflammation across your entire body. This is the slow, low-grade, chronic kind that builds silently over years and connects to most modern disease, from cardiovascular problems to autoimmunity to many cancers. Researchers call it inflammaging.
When GlycanAge ran twin studies, 40 percent of the result traced back to genetics and 60 percent came from epigenetics and lifestyle. Most of how you age still sits in your hands. And because glycan changes show up as much as ten years before symptoms and diagnosis, you get a long runway to do something with that information.
Why the Manager Profile Is the Hardest One to Treat
Nikolina sees this pattern constantly in executives, founders, high achieving academics, and anyone whose sense of safety runs through performance. She has measured 40 year olds with a GlycanAge of 80, and the common thread is usually childhood wiring that taught them love and security arrive only when they produce. The prescription is rest and recovery, which sounds gentle and turns out to be the hardest thing on earth for people built this way to accept.
Glycans also move slowly. The molecule being measured has a half-life of more than three weeks, so you need eight to twelve weeks before anything turns over. This test reads chronic patterns, not last night’s poor sleep.
Exercise Has a Sweet Spot, and It Belongs to You
GlycanAge studied a thousand people across four groups: professional athletes, lifelong moderate exercisers, sedentary overweight people, and complete beginners between the ages of 40 and 60. The lifelong moderate exercisers came out youngest, with women averaging ten years below their calendar age and men averaging seven. The professional athletes measured as inflamed as the sedentary group.
Beginners over 40 get more inflamed before they get better, and it takes roughly nine months for that inflammation to settle. Sprint and HIIT studies in twenty year old men showed biological age dropping across the board. HIIT stands for high intensity interval training, the format that alternates short bursts of maximum effort with brief recovery periods, and it has become the default setting in most gyms and fitness apps. Then Nikolina described a client with two small children, a demanding job, and a HIIT session every evening. She traded the HIIT for yoga and her GlycanAge fell thirteen years in twelve weeks.
Nikolina lived this herself. She boxed for seven years with a trainer who read her energy before every session and adjusted, then switched to an elite coach who ran the same brutal hour regardless, and she came down with a respiratory infection after nearly every one.
I do weight training, Pilates, boxing, and bouldering, and I have spent years treating my schedule as the final authority. If it was on the calendar, I did it. Some days now I look at the plan, feel where my energy sits, and choose rest instead. Skipping a workout, or a whole week, or the entire vacation, is a legitimate training decision.
Fasting and Diet Depend on Who You Are
I wrote The Fasting Bible, so this was the question I most wanted answered. Fasting lowers thyroid hormones. For someone reversing pre-diabetes or hypertension, that trade pays off handsomely. For a woman with a normal to low BMI and an underactive thyroid who skips meals every single day because she is too busy to cook something good, the math turns against her. Therapeutic fasting looks different again; a three to five day water fast shows a two to five year reduction in biological age.
Diet gave the same answer. Caloric restriction lowered biological age in most participants across several studies, including a two year trial. But when 700 people moved onto specific pre-made diets, high fat, high protein, and high carbohydrate, roughly half of each group responded in an anti-inflammatory direction and half responded in a pro-inflammatory one. Same food, opposite results, inside every single cohort. In glucose monitoring work out of the Weizmann Institute, some people spiked higher on beautiful sourdough than they did on cheap white store bread.
There is no universal answer here, which is exactly why Nikolina suggests testing your own response. Run a specific way of eating for two or three months, retest, and let your own biology tell you whether it is working. She has clients who have done this for years and held their gains.
Hormones and Psychology Move the Needle Most
Estrogen has the strongest measurable effect on biological age in Nikolina’s data, in both men and women, and the menopausal transition accelerates biological age by about ten years on average. Perimenopause often begins a decade before periods stop, yet most women get offered anything at all a full year after their cycle has already ended.
Nikolina’s route here is hormone therapy, and the FDA removed its black box warning in November 2025. Mine is herbal, which is what my book 30-Day Natural Menopause Reset is about, and what I keep coming back to is a line from that book: “herbal support is not one size fits all.” The same thing Nikolina found in her exercise and diet data holds for hormones. The measurement tells you the hormonal piece matters. It does not tell you which door to walk through.
Then there is the mind, which may turn out to be the biggest lever of all. GlycanAge tracked a fit 42 year old man with flawless blood work whose GlycanAge read 75. Four years of supplements and routine changes moved nothing. Six months after his divorce, it dropped roughly thirty years and fell below his calendar age. New love pushed it lower still. Nikolina has watched the same pattern in her own decade of data, where the only spikes came from relational loss.
Early trauma shows up in this data too. A PTSD diagnosis puts a person’s biological age around fifteen years above their calendar age on average, and shortens life expectancy by fifteen to twenty years, mostly because the usual chronic diseases arrive a decade earlier. Nikolina was careful to point out that PTSD responds to treatment, and that the same nervous system wiring can be rewired at any age. There is also a striking rheumatoid arthritis trial where patients stayed on identical medication and half added a form of psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems. After nine months their symptoms were subsiding, and some reached full remission.
What I Am Doing After My Biological Age Test
Every year your GlycanAge sits above your calendar age raises your risk of chronic disease and all cause mortality by about 10 percent, and every year below it lowers that risk by the same amount. You are looking at a number tied to what your next twenty years look like.
The test itself is a finger prick you do at home. Four good drops of blood, back in the prepaid envelope, results in three to four weeks. The analysis runs in a CLIA-certified lab on triplicate samples with an error margin of about one year, which is tighter than most of the aging clocks on the market. You get an AI report trained on GlycanAge’s published research to help you interpret your results, plus a one-to-one interpretation call with a GlycanAge specialist, and Nikolina told me the human conversation still outperforms the AI when it comes to people making changes that stick.
I am retesting in a few months. The changes I am making are not the ones I expected to be making, and I want to see whether my body counts rest as seriously as it counts everything else I have been doing right.
You can hear my full conversation with Nikolina on The Aging Games Podcast, and you can find the test at GlycanAge.
